Sony’s Gone ‘Back to the Drawing Board’ to Make Driveclub ‘Great’

The energy surrounding the upcoming PlayStation 4-exclusive racing game Driveclub has largely gone from excitement to skepticism. Driveclub was one of the first PlayStation 4 games revealed, and comes from Sony-owned Evolution Studio, a developer that not only understands the racing genre (it made its name on the MotorStorm franchise), but a developer that undoubtedly had very early access to PlayStation 4.

Revealed as a launch title, Driveclub was unceremoniously delayed on the eve of PS4’s western release, creating questions as to what’s going on with it. We got a chance to speak to Sony’s Scott Rohde – one of the men in charge of Sony’s family of first party studios – about the status of its phantom racing game.

...we think we’re on track to deliver what we think is going to be a great game, and when we get closer, we realize that we’d be doing everyone a disservice if we shipped it before it was ready.

“What I will say is that it all comes back to that fundamental principle, and that’s that we want to build great games,” Rohde said. “And we really don’t want to release a game before it’s ready. And sometimes, this happens in the normal course of business, where we think we’re on track to deliver what we think is going to be a great game, and when we get closer, we realize that we’d be doing everyone a disservice if we shipped it before it was ready.”

“So, I think that at PlayStation, perhaps more than at other places, we’re willing to kinda eat that [cost],” Rohde continued, “and go back to the drawing board and make sure the game is great before we ship it. And that’s what’s going on right now with that game.”

When asked about when it’ll launch, Rohde said, “We’re not announcing any specifics on that yet.” When pressed on if it would still come out sometime in 2014, Rohde refused to say, though Sony PR stepped in to say that we’d get more details soon.